Writing About Writing: Collaboration

Collaboration sounds like a great idea, until you actually do it.

Most writers have friends or social groups that they bounce ideas and feedback off, or alpha readers for feedback, or something similar, but that's different from collaborating.

This is not to say that collaborating with another author is bad, just a lot more difficult than people think. A lot of collaborations never get up off the ground, or end up splitting ways halfway through, leaving both in limbo while they sort out who owns publishing rights to what.

I know someone that I've failed at collaborating with no less than 4 times. The brain-storming, plot development and character storylines go great, but then we start writing and immediately disagree on how spicy it should be, and the level of plot vs smut. Every single time, we end up writing two entirely different stories, and adding disclaimers that similarities between one and the other are not plagiarism.

Often we'll add each other as contributors, just to avoid anyone getting trigger happy.

An example of the most recent collaboration attempt that parted ways. I wanted to put these side by side, but embedding wouldn't let me.

Obviously, there are broad similarities in the art and book summaries, but you can still tell at a glance that they went in very different directions...

And not just because one was published months ago and one is still in pre-order.

Even when collaborations are successful, there are a lot of moving parts.

What are the deadlines for outlines, first drafts, first review? How flexible are those deadlines? How many of the people contributing have other projects? Is there a conflict resolution process for when people disagree? Who is committed to being part of it, vs just potentially interested vs only thinks they're involved?

No, the significant other who barely reads but 100% wants 'equal credit' for trying to insert their ideas despite multiple gentle refusals is not a collaborator, no matter how much they whine about deserving a cut.

Can everyone agree on an editor? What about Cover Art and Artists? How about the distribution of royalties? That's not so bad with anthologies, where you can say that each story is worth X% of royalties, so anyone contributing multiple stories gets a bigger cut. It's trickier when you have 4 people working on a 500K word book, and have to work out whether to split royalties based on contribution, or equal division.

Oh, and everyone needs to come to terms with the fact that their cut will be smaller than they're used to, and may come down to pennies depending on how many collaborators there are. Please don't throw a tantrum after the first pay-cheque; you agreed to the distribution when all this started.

I've been a collaborator for 4 anthologies, so far. Two of them were for charity, with only a nominal amount of bickering over which charity. I would have loved to contribute to a 5th group-written book, but I can't draw for crap, so I settled for enthusiastically cheering from the sidelines.

Currently, I'm working on a group-written novel, which can be summed up as "Jane Austen meets Groundhog Day", with each chapter being a 're-set'.

This works well as a collaboration, because it means that other than an identical opening sentence and trying to keep a broadly similar writing style, everyone is free to go in wildly different directions with their chapters.

Step 1 was for the Grand High Instigator, Jeff, to post the idea in the writing group to gauge interest. Then he created a sub-group specifically for those who expressed a tentative commitment.

Step 2 was brainstorming and idea feedback. We're really running the range from tragedy and high angst to adventure and outright comedy in this thing. People posted chapter ideas, offered suggestions and feedback on other people's ideas, and indicated how much or how little they'd be willing to commit to. The important part here was that no-one wanted two chapters that were practically identical, so if someone had multiple ideas and one was very similar to another person's, we could hash out which one of them was spit-balling for inspiration and who really wanted to write that particular idea.

Next was a shared Google Doc, invite only, with sub-folders for outlines, actual chapters, cover art ideas, and anything else that might come up.

We had regular progress meetings. Those were designed to be a space where people could offer feedback on what had already been written, including wording suggestions or if something felt out of character. It was also where someone could admit that they might need to scale back their commitment, and anyone who'd finished their part could offer to take over.

Last weekend, after our First Draft deadline, we had another meeting for chapter order review. Originally, because each chapter was quite self-contained, chapter order was assigned based on who had submitted their chapter idea/outline first. Now that the chapters were actually written, it had become very clear that in terms of character development and plot progression, some shuffling was required.

If a particular high-angst chapter stayed where it was first assigned, for instance, it would feel like a character regression, because the character had grown past the point where their self-sabotage and disbelief in the other's sincerity was believable.

That chapter got moved to earlier in the story, while one of my chapters was pushed back to later in the novel, because at my originally designated point in the story, it didn't feel believable for the feelings to be so advanced yet.

Now, we have two weeks for minor edits and re-writes before a second chapter review meeting, at which point we're planning to have read through all the chapters and made suggestions if any of them need to be moved further forward or back, or if any filler chapters are needed.

We're definitely not meeting our original publication deadline of the end of the year, but so far, so good.